A 50-year-old man was arrested and remanded for 4 days by the Limassol district court after the police found a connection between him and an attempted murder that was committed in 2001.
The victim in question, Andreas Pafitis, aka ‘Yena,’ was shot outside his warehouse on October 16, 2001 in Limassol. Though he survived, he was critically injured. There were multiple perpetrators at the scene, all of whom had fled in a stolen car with fake registration plates, which was found burnt in a hospital’s parking lot. The police could recover the license plates and filed them as evidence since they bore DNA evidence.
According to the police investigator, the 50-year-old man was arrested by the police during a periodic crackdown on organized crime. An illegal hunting gun was found in the man’s residence. Once his fingerprints were taken during questioning for the possession of the hunting gun, and were found to have matched the ones on the license plates of the stolen car used to commit the attempted murder, the man was remanded by the district court in Limassol.
The investigator further added in his statement to the court that the suspect was uncooperative, and his defense lawyers alleged that the police illegally took their client’s’ fingerprints illegally and are trying to “frame him” to the attempted murder.
Interestingly, the suspect had been questioned in 2001, but was released after no evidence could be gathered against him.